December 22, 190,5.] 



SCIENCE. 



819 



and the southern plains and foothills and 

 jungles gave homes to literal hundreds of 

 peoples, distinguished by physical type, by 

 speech and faith, by caste, and by dis- 

 tinctive customs or clear territorial limits — 

 and out of this hive of humanity sprang all 

 the great religions the world has known. 

 In the western fraction of the Eurasian 

 land-mass there were, a half-century ago, 

 several scores of tribes varying in physical 

 type from the blond Dane and rufous 

 Viking to the swart Iberian, speaking some 

 dozens of distinctive tongues, adoring the 

 shrines of countless nature-deities, and 

 garnering germs of drama and letters and 

 philosophy in the Walhalla of the north, 

 the Elysium of the south, and the legion 

 lost fanes and faiths of the middle lands. 

 As the centuries sped, the tribes and 

 tongues were partly blent through conquest 

 by Aryan leaders who carried the cult and 

 the color of the Caucasus northwestward, 

 until by the middle of our era the shore- 

 lands of the North Sea region throbbed 

 with the most commingled blood and the 

 most complex culture of the globe — then 

 the human blood spanned the straits and 

 rose pent in Britain to flow out in streams 

 of compelling vigor, bridging all seas and 

 reaching the remotest lands of the earth. 

 All these — of the Americas and Africa, 

 Australia and Oceanica, Asia and Europe 

 — are among the peoples whose multifari- 

 ous resemblances and differences appeal to 

 every observer. They are alike in that all 

 are fire-makers and so control thermic force 

 for the weal of their kind through conquest 

 over other nature ; and with this suggestion 

 of force as the primary factor in human af- 

 fairs, the apparent chaos of humanity falls 

 into order — for all are controlled by a few 

 types of law, i. e., of human force directed 

 to human ends. The simplest type of law 

 is that of control of the maternal family, 

 under which the mother protects and di- 



rects her own children, appealing when 

 needful to her own mother's strongest off- 

 spring, i. e., her eldest brother; and this 

 was the law of the less-developed aborigines 

 of the Americas, Africa, Australia, Ocean- 

 ica' and Asia. More comprehensive is the 

 law of control of the paternal family group, 

 in which the physically stronger father 

 guards and guides his own children and 

 their offspring and dependents and those 

 of his younger {%. e., weaker) brethren; 

 this law befits militancy and nomadic habit 

 and the pastoral condition, and prevailed 

 among the more advanced aborigines of 

 America and Africa and many of the 

 peoples of Oceanica and Asia. Still more 

 comprehensive is the law of control of ten- 

 ure ; in arid lands, where the chief values 

 inhere in springs and wells with adjacent 

 lands, the control is essentially territorial, 

 and in the east Mediterranean region the 

 law gave demos and urbs — i. e., the artifi- 

 cial group and the ancient city ; in fruitful 

 lands, where the chief values inhere in 

 occupations and products and good-will, 

 the law is essentially industrial, and in 

 India yielded caste, and elsewhere trades 

 and guilds, i. e., overlapping artificial 

 groups; and in broken country (including 

 archipelagoes) the control is partly terri- 

 torial and partly industrial, and in eastern 

 Asia, most of Europe, and much of Ocean- 

 ica, the law produced the province — i. e., 

 the more or less independent region of in- 

 terdependent interests : and everywhere the 

 basis of the law was economic and proprie- 

 tary, and its observance reacted on the 

 mind in such manner as to awaken recogni- 

 tion — especially in Greece and Rome and 

 Kong (China) and more especially in 

 Palestine — of the correlative interests of 

 neighbors. AVhile the law of control of 

 tenure rose above the law of control of 

 kindred in principle, the two ran together 

 in practise so that the demos and urbs, 



